Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Universal and contingent image schema and cognitive structures

On
a practical level, the evolution of language is relevant to this previous post.
If we have universal, neurolinguistic human structures then we might be
able to correlate this with universal human cognitive structures of the
type we all go through, the usual developmental hierarchy. But there are
over 5,000 languages in the world, quite a diversity, so what is
universal about language and what is particular to cultures, regions,
dialects? And given the ontocartographical bent, even different climates
and geographies? And does that say something about English language
prejudices about cognitive structures?

This
recent paper suggests that "language seems to have evolved along
varied, complicated paths, guided less by neurological settings than
cultural circumstance." It mentions Chomsky's universal grammar, and
that there may be a limited repertoire of universals but contra Chomsky
they are minimal and diversity is the rule.

Recall Lakoff challenged Chomsky's universal grammar for cognitive
(embodied) linguistics, of which I've made much hay. Lakoff also claims
universals like image schema that he claims cross all cultures. But in this post
and following there have been challenges to this view, noting that some
cultural factors indeed enact different image schema. And not only
that, but cultural development can via downward causation actually
create new image schema that were not there originally, given brain
plasticity and growth.

And this article
explores how a different geography produces different sounds,
influencing how languages in high altitude regions develop different
sounds. It also mentions that some studies noted more vowel usage in
warmer climes, though it is controversial. I'd suggest the possibility
that this could also affect semantic content in adapting to different
geographies. Granted this entire field of geographical linguistics is
relatively new, but it is proceeding nonetheless. And given such new
philosophical fields like onto-cartography it seems an interesting topic
to explore.

Balder explored the possible relationship of different philosophical
schools being associated with particular linguistic elements. This could
also extend to how different languages themselves developed from
different, or at least variations of, universal cognitive structures,
themselves highly influenced by climate, elevation and a host of other
geographical elements. This is not to deny we have some universal
cognitive structures, but that there might not be as many as we assume
given our own language. And there may indeed be differences and/or
variations in those cognitive structures based on cultural difference,
themselves influenced by geographical parameters. These could very well
be at least some of those unconscious (and virtual in that respect)
attractors to which we gravitate in forming language, culture and even
cognitive structures.

This article
by Sinha and de Lopez, for example, lauds Lakoff et al for going beyond
Piaget's logico-mathematical modeling in formulating invariant
cognitive structures, but still criticizes the former for engaging in
the same "epistemic individualism" (29). And while Lakoff refuted the
logico-mathematical basis of cognitive structure with an embodied
structure, he also retained the notion of universal, invariant
structure in individuals. The authors notes that while embodiment
theories might resolve the mind-body half of the Cartesian dualism it
still needs work on the individual-social half (30).

In a later section of the paper he discusses Vygotsky, who includes
material functionality into the mix of image schema. And that different
cultures apply this functionality differently with the consequent
difference in image schema, language and cognitive structure.

“Our suggestion, then, is that a nonlinguistic sociocultural
difference regarding canonical artifact use, embodied in the material
cultures and exemplified in nonlinguistic cultural practices, gives rise
to slightly but significantly different conceptualizations of
'containment' in the different cultures” (35-6).

Given that containment is a significant schema in forming
mereological relations and extended in how we formulate levels of
development, this could point to a different cognitive structure for
said levels. He also notes that Vygotsky applied this to material
linguistic mediators, and given the different languages that developed
from different schema this also involved different semantic content
(36).

The above is just one example of how the Piagetian and Wilberian (and
even Lakoffian) notions of universal structure are not eliminated but
certainly adjusted when we take account of the above.